Ceres is seen from NASA's Dawn spacecraft on March 1, just a few days before the mission achieved orbit around the previously unexplored dwarf planet. The image was taken at a distance of about 30,000 miles (about 48,000 kilometers).Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

NASA's Dawn spacecraft has become the first mission to achieve orbit around a dwarf planet. The spacecraft was approximately 38,000 miles (61,000 kilometers) from Ceres when it was captured by the dwarf planet’s gravity at about 4:39 a.m. PST (7:39 a.m. EST) Friday.

Mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California received a signal from the spacecraft at 5:36 a.m. PST (8:36 a.m. EST) that Dawn was healthy and thrusting with its ion engine, the indicator Dawn had entered orbit as planned. "Since its discovery in 1801, Ceres was known as a planet, then an asteroid and later a dwarf planet," said Marc Rayman, Dawn chief engineer and mission director at JPL. "Now, after a journey of 3.1 billion miles (4.9 billion kilometers) and 7.5 years, Dawn calls Ceres, home."

In addition to being the first spacecraft to visit a dwarf planet, Dawn also has the distinction of being the first mission to orbit two extraterrestrial targets. From 2011 to 2012, the spacecraft explored the giant asteroid Vesta, delivering new insights and thousands of images from that distant world. Ceres and Vesta are the two most massive residents of our solar system’s main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The most recent images received from the spacecraft, taken on March 1 show Ceres as a crescent, mostly in shadow because the spacecraft's trajectory put it on a side of Ceres that faces away from the sun until mid-April. When Dawn emerges from Ceres' dark side, it will deliver ever-sharper images as it spirals to lower orbits around the planet. "We feel exhilarated," said Chris Russell, principal investigator of the Dawn mission at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). "We have much to do over the next year and a half, but we are now on station with ample reserves, and a robust plan to obtain our science objectives." Dawn's mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital ATK Inc., in Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Italian Space Agency and Italian National Astrophysical Institute are international partners on the mission team.

This Sunday, a house-sized asteroid named "2014 RC" will fly through the Earth-Moon system almost inside the orbit of geosynchronous satellites. At closest approach, Sept. 7th at 18:18 UTC, the 20-meter-wide space rock will pass just 40,000 km over New Zealand. This diagram from NASA shows the geometry of the encounter:

There is no danger of a collision with Earth. Asteroid 2014 RC was discovered on the night of August 31 by the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Arizona, and independently detected the next night by the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope, located on the summit of Haleakalā on Maui, Hawaii. Follow-up observations quickly confirmed the orbit of 2014 RC: it comes from just beyond the orbit of Mars. The close appproach of this space rock offers researchers an opportunity for point-blank studies of a near-Earth asteroid. Even amateur astronomers will be able to track it. Around the time of closest approach, it will brighten to magnitude +11.5 as it zips through the constellation Pisces. This means it will be invisible to the naked eye but a relatively easy target for backyard telescopes equipped with CCD cameras. [ephemeris] [3D orbit] According to NASA, "[the orbit of 2014 RC] will bring it back to our planet's neighborhood in the future. The asteroid's future motion will be closely monitored, but no future threatening Earth encounters have been identified."www.spaceweather.com

A solar wind blown from the surface of the sun at about a million miles per hour flows around all solar system objects, forming swirling eddies and vortices in its wake. Magnetic fields carried by the solar wind warp, twist, and snap as they slam into the magnetic fields around other objects in our solar system, blasting particles to millions of miles per hour and sending electric currents surging in magnetic storms that, around Earth, can damage sensitive technology like satellites and power grids.

On airless objects like moons and asteroids, sunlight ejects negatively charged electrons from matter, giving sunlit areas a strong positive electric charge. The solar wind is an electrically conducting gas called plasma where matter has been torn apart into electrons, which are relatively light, and positively charged ions, which are thousands of times more massive. While areas in sunlight can charge positive, areas in shadow get a strong negative charge when electrons in the solar wind rush in ahead of heavier ions to fill voids created as the solar wind flows by. The surface of Earth is shielded from the direct effects of this activity by our planet's magnetic field, but airless objects without strong repelling magnetic fields, like small asteroids, have no protection from electrical activity in space.

ESOWed, 26 Mar 2014 11:46 CDTAn international team of astronomers, led by Felipe Braga-Ribas (Observatório Nacional/MCTI, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), has used telescopes at seven locations in South America, including the 1.54-metre Danish and TRAPPIST telescopes at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile, to make a surprise discovery in the outer Solar System.

This unexpected result raises several unanswered questions and is expected to provoke much debate. A press conference will be held in Brazil to present the new results and allow opportunities for questions.

Note that all information regarding these findings is under strict embargo until 19:00 CET (15:00 BRT) on Wednesday 26 March 2014.

Observations at many sites in South America, including ESO’s La Silla Observatory, have made the surprise discovery that the remote asteroid Chariklo is surrounded by two dense and narrow rings. This is the smallest object by far found to have rings and only the fifth body in the Solar System — after the much larger planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — to have this feature. The origin of these rings remains a mystery, but they may be the result of a collision that created a disc of debris. The new results are published online in the journal Nature on 26 March 2014. The rings of Saturn are one of the most spectacular sights in the sky, and less prominent rings have also been found around the other giant planets. Despite many careful searches, no rings had been found around smaller objects orbiting the Sun in the Solar System. Now observations of the distant minor planet (10199) Chariklo as it passed in front of a star have shown that this object too is surrounded by two fine rings.More at: http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1410/

(CNN) -- For anyone holding out hope of Pluto being reinstated as a major planet, you should probably do as they say in the movie "Frozen" and "let it go." But here's a new exciting find from the far reaches of our solar system: Astronomers have discovered a dwarf planet that's even farther away than Pluto -- so far, in fact, that its orbit reaches into a new edge of the solar system. The dwarf planet's current name is 2012 VP113, and it is located in a "wasteland or badland of the solar system," said astronomer Chad Trujillo, head of adaptive optics at Gemini Observatory in Hawaii and co-discoverer of this object. His study was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. "The big question is, how is this formed? How can you get an object out there?" he said. "We really don't know an answer to that yet." This dwarf planet is unusual because of its orbit, Trujillo said. On its elliptical path, the closest it ever comes to the sun is still very far away from the rest of the solar system. Its full orbit is farther than the orbit of any other object we know of in the solar system.More at: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/26/tech/innovation/dwarf-planet-solar-system/

A surprise monster may be lurking in our solar system. A newly discovered dwarf planet has grabbed the crown as the most distant known object in our solar system - and its orbit hints at a giant, unseen rocky world, 10 times the mass of Earth and orbiting far beyond Pluto.

The dwarf planet, for now dubbed 2012 VP113 because it was spotted in images taken in November 2012 - is an interesting discovery in itself. Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC and his colleagues found that it is a lump of rock and ice 450 kilometres wide and lies at 80 astronomical units from the sun at its closest approach (1 AU is Earth's distance from the sun).

That's twice as far as the most famous dwarf planet, Pluto, which is 2340 kilometres wide and also beats the previous record holder, a 1000-kilometre-wide planetoid called Sedna, discovered in 2003, with a closest approach of 76 AU out.

Objects orbiting this far from the sun, in the "inner Oort cloud", are useful to probe the early solar system. That's because they lie too far away to be perturbed by the gas planets, but too close to the sun to be affected by the gravity of other stars in our galaxy - so their orbits and behaviour are thought to be almost unchanged since they first formed. "Once we find more objects in this region, we'll be able to start to strongly constrain the possible formation scenarios," says Sheppard. More at: http://www.sott.net/article/276322-New-dwarf-planet-hints-at-giant-world-far-beyond-Pluto

Mars is approaching Earth for a close encounter in mid-April. As the two planets converge, the red color of Mars is becoming increasingly vivid to the naked eye. This is especially true because Mars is located not far from Spica, a blue-giant star of first magnitude in the constellation Virgo. Each evening when Mars and Spica rise side by side in the eastern sky, the red-blue contrast is eye-catching:

Astronomy professor Jimmy Westlake of Colorado Mountain College took the picture on March 20th, the first night of northern spring, and labeled it to show not only "ruddy Mars and icy-blue Spica," but also two nearby space rocks. "This spring, Mars is looping through the stars of Virgo alongside the large asteroids Ceres and Vesta," explains Westlake. "All three reach opposition next month: Mars on April 8th, Vesta on April 13th, and Ceres on April 15th. Vesta, the nearer and more reflective of the two, appears about a magnitude brighter than Ceres. Both are within easy grasp of binoculars." Look for Mars and Spica rising in the east after sunset, around 9 pm local time. A backyard telescope pointed at Mars will show you more than a red dot. Mars's north polar cap, surface features and clouds are being photographed by amateur astronomers around the world as the red planet grows larger in the eyepiece every night. Browse the gallery for examples: Realtime Mars Photo Gallerywww.spaceweather.com

Nov. 7, 2013: Astronomers viewing our solar system's asteroid belt with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have seen for the first time an asteroid with six comet-like tails of dust. Designated P/2013 P5, the asteroid resembles a rotating lawn sprinkler. "We were literally dumbfounded when we saw it," said lead investigator David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles. "Even more amazing, its tail structures change dramatically in just 13 days as it belches out dust. That also caught us by surprise. It's hard to believe we’re looking at an asteroid."

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope set of images reveals a never-before-seen set of six comet-like tails radiating from a body in the asteroid belt, designated P/2013 P5.

A state of the art satellite is being sent into space to monitor the blind zone between the Earth and the sun to warn of incoming asteroids. Astronomers have previously not been able to spot asteroids in the 'blind zone' due to radiation from the sun blocking information. But now The European Space Agency intends to launch the Gaia Space Telescope with its key task being to monitor the area between the Earth and the sun and warn of any impending collisions. One recent asteroid which could have been spotted as it travelled through the 'blind zone' months before it collided with the Earth, was that of the Russian asteroid of February this year which caused a spectacular fireball before smashing into Chelyabinsk, 900 miles east of Russia.

Gerry Gilmore, professor of experimental philosophy at Cambridge University's Institute of Astronomy told the Sunday Times: "Gaia will measure all the asteroids including those between us and the sun which are the really nasty ones because we can't see them."

During its five-year-mission the £800 million Gaia will also map the stars with unprecedented precision - giving astronomers the first accurate 3D map of our galaxy and measure distance between the stars. A spokseman for the ESA said: "During its anticipated lifetime of five years, Gaia will observe each of its 1billion sources about 70 times, resulting in a record of the brightness and position of each source over time.

"Together with the unprecedented accuracy of the astrometric measurements, this will lead to the discovery of planets around other stars, asteroids in our Solar System, icy bodies in the outer Solar System, brown dwarfs, and far-distant supernovae and quasars. The list of Gaia's potential discoveries makes the mission unique in scope and scientific return."

NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office has upgraded its estimates of a major fireball that exploded over the southeastern USA around 2:30 AM on August 28th. Lead researcher Bill Cooke says "the fireball reached a peak apparent magnitude of -16, about 20 times brighter than a Full Moon, and cast shadows on the ground. This indicates that the meteoroid had a mass of more than 110 kg (240 lbs) and was up to a meter in diameter. It hit the top of Earth's atmosphere traveling 25 km/s (56,000 mph)." (see movie in previous entry, below)

"This is the brightest event our network has observed in 5 years of operation," he continues. "There are reports of sonic booms reaching the ground, and data from 4 doppler radars indicate that some meteorites may have fallen along the fireball's ground track." (Note: The city in the ground track map is Cleveland, Tennessee, not Cleveland, Ohio.) An initial calculation of the fireball's orbit suggested it might be a fragment from a Jupiter family comet. Improved estimates of the orbital parameters point to a different kind of object: a main belt asteroid. If meteorites are recovered from the Tennessee countryside, their chemical composition will tell researchers more about the origin of the fireball. www.spaceweather.com

August 3, 2013 – SPACE - Colombian scientists have discovered what may be a graveyard of comets in a very strange spot — and now, some of the interred are coming back to life. These so-called “Lazarus” comets, described in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, may represent a long-lost population of the icy space travelers and may alter scientists’ understanding of their origins. These chunks of ice and rock, typically a few kilometers across, have long held human imaginations as “falling stars.” As a comet travels around the sun, the heat and light vaporize some of the water ice trapped inside, causing the signature tail of glowing gas and dust to form behind it. They’re thought to have started out near the fringes of the planetary system, with stretched, elliptical orbits that are so extreme that some of comets circle the sun only once in several thousand years. Others have quicker round-trips of a couple of centuries or so; these so-called short-period comets are the source of such famous sightings as Halley’s Comet. But in recent years, astronomers started to pick up strange, comet-like bodies popping up where they hadn’t expected them — in the main belt, the wide ring of asteroids that sits between Mars and Jupiter.

The surprising property of these objects is that their orbits are entirely asteroidal while their behavior is entirely cometary,” the researchers wrote. That’s surprising, because comets aren’t supposed to be there, right in the middle of the planetary lineup. The main belt is filled with rocky debris from several feet to hundreds of miles long. These asteroids could have been the building blocks of another planet, had Jupiter’s gravity not kept the fragments apart. What were comets, thought to originate on the fringes of our solar neighborhood, doing there? According to researchers from the University of Antioquia in Colombia, there may have been a sizable population of comets in the main belt in the past that had long since “died,” their icy reserves nearly expended by heat and light from the sun. Some of these comets, however, were merely dormant, the researchers found, and if their orbits were nudged just slightly closer to the sun’s warming rays, it could release ice trapped deep within the comets, bringing them back to life. “Thus, we propose that the asteroidal belt contains an enormous graveyard of ancient dormant and extinct rocky comets, that turn on [are rejuvenated], in response to a diminution of their perihelion distance, caused by planetary perturbations.” A dozen such Lazarus comets were picked up among the asteroids over the past decade, and it’s quite possible there are many more out there, the researchers said. –LA Times

Planetary Break-up: “In 1978, I proposed a new theory that comets originated in the energetic breakup of a body orbiting the Sun in or near the present location of the asteroid belt in the relatively recent past…if comets did originate in a break-up event in the inner solar system, then the original distances of closest approach to the Sun for their orbits must all have been less than or equal to the distance at which the break-up occurred ….

Astronomer Oort always maintained that an origin of comets from within the solar system, perhaps in connection with the event which gave rise to the asteroid belt, was the most probable.” Dark Matter, Missing Planet, New Comets, Tom Van Flanderen, pp. 185-191, 1991 www.spaceweather.com

June 27, 2013 – SPACE – NASA said the 10,000th near-Earth object (NEO) has been discovered using the Pan-STARRS-1 telescope in Hawaii. Astronomers spotted asteroid 2013 MZ5 on the night of June 18, marking a significant milestone for the NEO search. The space agency said 90 percent of all NEOs discovered were first detected by NASA-supported surveys. “But there are at least 10 times that many more to be found before we can be assured we will have found any and all that could impact and do significant harm to the citizens of Earth,” said Lindley Johnson, program executive for NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations Program at NASA Headquarters, Washington. In order to be classified as an NEO, a comet or asteroid must approach Earth at an orbital distance to within about 28 million miles. They range in size from as small as a few feet to as large as 25 miles for the largest NEO. Asteroid 2013 MZ5 is about 1,000 feet across and will never be close enough to Earth to be considered potentially hazardous.

“The first near-Earth object was discovered in 1898,” said Don Yeomans, long-time manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Over the next hundred years, only about 500 had been found. But then, with the advent of NASA’s NEO Observations program in 1998, we’ve been racking them up ever since. And with new, more capable systems coming on line, we are learning even more about where the NEOs are currently in our solar system, and where they will be in the future.” About 10 percent of the 10,000 NEOs discovered are larger than six-tenths of a mile, which is roughly the size that could produce global consequences if one struck Earth. However, NASA says its program has found that none of these larger NEOs currently pose an impact threat. NASA said scientists predict there to be about 15,000 NEOs that are one-and-a-half football fields in size, or 480 feet.

There could be more than a million NEOs that are about one-third of a football field in size. An NEO hitting Earth would need to be about 100 feet or larger in order to cause significant damage in a populated area. The space agency said less than one percent of the 100-foot-sized NEOs have been detected. “These days we average three NEO discoveries a day, and each month the Minor Planet Center receives hundreds of thousands of observations on asteroids, including those in the main-belt,” said Tim Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center. “The work done by the NASA surveys, and the other international professional and amateur astronomers, to discover and track NEOs is really remarkable.”

Earlier this month, NASA announced a grand challenge focused on finding all asteroid threats to human populations. This “Great Challenge”is to ask citizen scientists, along with industry professionals, to focus on detecting and characterizing asteroids and learn how to deal with potential threats. “We will also harness public engagement, open innovation and citizen science to help solve this global problem,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver. The space agency also invited industry and potential partners to offer up some ideas on accomplishing NASA’s goals to locate, redirect and explore an asteroid. –Red Orbit

June 10, 2013 – CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida – An asteroid the size of a small truck zoomed past Earth four times closer than the moon on Saturday, the latest in a parade of visiting celestial objects that has raised awareness of potentially hazardous impacts on the planet. NASA said Asteroid 2013 LR6 was discovered about a day before its closest approach to Earth, which occurred at 12:42 a.m. EDT (0442 GMT on Saturday) about 65,000 miles over the Southern Ocean, south of Tasmania, Australia. The 30-foot-wide (10-meter-wide) asteroid posed no threat. A week ago, the comparatively huge 1.7-mile-wide (2.7-km-wide) asteroid QE2, complete with its own moon in tow, passed 3.6 million miles (5.8 million km) from Earth. While on February 15, a small asteroid exploded in the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia, leaving more than 1,500 people injured by flying glass and debris. That same day, an unrelated asteroid passed just 17,200 miles from Earth, closer than the networks of communication satellites that ring the planet. “There is theoretically a collision possible between asteroids and planet Earth,” astronomer Gianluca Masi, with the Virtual Telescope project, said during a Google+ webcast that showed live images of the approaching asteroid. NASA says it has found about 95 percent of the large asteroids, those with diameters 0.65 miles or larger, with orbits that take them relatively close to Earth. An object of that size hit the planet about 65 million years ago in what is now Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, triggering a global climate change that is believed to be responsible for the demise of the dinosaurs and many other forms of life on Earth. The U.S. space agency and other research organizations, as well as private companies, are working on tracking smaller objects that fly near Earth. -NBChttp://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/asteroid-the-size-of-a-small-truck-buzzes-earth-nasa/

DAYLIGHT METEOR SHOWER: This week, Earth is passing through a stream of debris from asteroid Icarus, source of the annual Arietid meteor shower. The strange thing about this shower is that it occurs mainly during daylight hours. At its peak on June 7-8, as many as 60 Arietids per hour will streak invisibly across the blue sky after sunrise. The best way to observe the Arietids is via radar. Listen to their echoes on Space Weather Radio.

SOLAR FLARE AND CME: (Updated: June 6, 2013) Southern sunspot AR1762 erupted on June 5th, producing a long-duration M1-class solar flare that peaked around 0900 UT. The explosion hurled a bright coronal mass ejection (CME) into space, shown here in a coronagraph image from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory:

Although the blast was not Earth-directed, the CME might still affect our planet. Forecast tracks prepared by analysts at NOAA suggest that the CME could deliver a glancing blow to Earth's magnetic field during the late hours of June 8th. NOAA: 65% chance of polar geomagnetic storms. ALBERT EINSTEIN ORBITS EARTH: On the afternoon of June 5th, the European Space Agency launched a robotic spaceship named "Albert Einstein" into Earth orbit. Also known as "ATV-4" (Automated Transfer Vehicle 4), the Albert Einstein is a cargo carrier laden with supplies for the International Space Station. Marco Langbroek saw it flying over Leiden, the Netherlands, just two hours after launch:

"The ATV-4 was very bright (mag +1 to +0.5) and easily visible to the naked eye, even from Leiden center," Langbroek. "Still in a low orbit, it was very fast." To resupply the space station, the Albert Einstein is carrying the most dry cargo ever launched by a European spacecraft--2,480 kilograms, and the most diverse cargo mix--1400 different items. It will catch up to and dock with the ISS on June 15th. As that date approaches, the ATV-4 and the ISS will become visible in the night sky at the same time. NOCTILUCENT CLOUDS IN MOTION: The northern season for noctilucent clouds (NLCs) is underway. Since the middle of May, NASA's AIM spacecraft has been seeing banks of electric-blue NLCs circling Earth's north pole on a regular basis. Now, observers report that the clouds are spreading south. Pete Lawrence of Selsey UK photographed this apparition on June 3th (go to: http://spaceweather.com/gallery/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=82871 to set the clouds in motion):

"I witnessed this fine NLC display on the morning of June 3rd," says Lawrence. "My location is 50.75N so it was amazing to see the clouds so far from the poles. As dawn approached, fingers of NLC spread until they were virtually overhead!" Noctilucent clouds (NLCs) form near the top of Earth's polar atmosphere when water vapor from the planet below mixes with meteor debris from space. They appear during summer because that is when the mesosphere is coldest and most humid. This year, NLCs appeared early, more than a full month before the solstice, setting the stage for an unusually good NLC-watching season. High latitude sky watchers should be alert for NLCs in the evenings ahead. In recent years they have been sighted as far south as Utah, Colorado, and Nebraska. Observing tips: Look west 30 to 60 minutes after sunset when the sun has dipped 6o to 16o below the horizon. If you see luminous blue-white tendrils spreading across the sky, you've probably spotted a noctilucent cloud. www.spaceweather.com

Asteroid (285263) 1998 QE2 has a moon! The asteroid pair is currently on a relatively near pass of Earth, sailing by us at a closest approach of just under 6 million kilometers (3.6 million miles) later today (Friday 31 May). Asteroids that get this close are of particular interest to astronomers, because that means we can use radio telescopes to bounce radar off them, which can lead to a better determination of their size, shape, speed, and position. Using the Goldstone telescope in California, astronomers were surprised to find that 1998 QE2 is actually a binary asteroid, a big rock being orbited by a smaller one. Statistically, it’s not shocking that 1998 QE2 has a moon; about 16 percent of near-Earth asteroids bigger than 200 meters across have companions. The primary asteroid is about 2.7 kilometers (1.7 miles) across, as previously estimated, and the moon is about 600 meters (2000 feet) across.

More observations are planned over the next few days, including using the Arecibo radio telescope which will provide higher-resolution data. Mind you, the radar data is a bit weird. It’s not showing you an actual picture of the asteroid. The vertical axis is showing distance to the asteroid—if there’s a hill you’d see it poke up toward the top, and a crater would be a depression. The horizontal axis, though, is actually the velocity at which the asteroid is spinning. The faster the rock spins, the more smeared out it is left-to-right; one that doesn’t spin at all would look like a vertical line. I know, it’s weird, but it’s the way this kind of radar observation works. Not only that, but we’re illuminating it with the radar pulses, so when you look at the picture or video, it’s like the radio telescope is off the top of the frame, shining down on the asteroid. Imagine holding an orange in one hand and a flashlight in the other; you’re illuminating one side, not the whole thing. Radar reflections are strongest from the point on the asteroid directly under the radar beam, so that becomes the bright edge in the image. The reflections tend to get weaker near the edge, so it fades toward the bottom, giving it that odd crescent shape. The moon looks curiously bright in the radar imagery, but I’m not sure why; I haven’t heard any comments about this yet—that may simply be because it’s small, so we don’t see it fade as much toward its edges like we do in the bigger rock. Think of it like having all its light compressed into fewer pixels, so each pixel is brighter. –Slate

Asteroid With Own Moon Nears Earth Friday

Nuclear detonation the best way to deflect threatening asteroids, say experts: If a dangerous asteroid appears to be on a collision course for Earth, one option is to send a spacecraft to destroy it with a nuclear warhead. Such a mission, which would cost about $1 billion, could be developed from work NASA is already funding, a prominent asteroid defense expert says. Bong Wie, director of the Asteroid Deflection Research Center at Iowa State University, described the system his team is developing to attendees at the International Space Development Conference in La Jolla, Calif., on May 23. The annual National Space Society gathering attracted hundreds from the space industry around the world. An anti-asteroid spacecraft would deliver a nuclear warhead to destroy an incoming threat before it could reach Earth, Wie said. The two-section spacecraft would consist of a kinetic energy impactor that would separate before arrival and blast a crater in the asteroid. The other half of the spacecraft would carry the nuclear weapon, which would then explode inside the crater after the vehicle impacted. The goal would be to fragment the asteroid into many pieces, which would then disperse along separate trajectories.

Wie believes that up to 99 percent or more of the asteroid pieces could end up missing the Earth, greatly limiting the impact on the planet. Of those that do reach our world, many would burn up in the atmosphere and pose no threat. Wie’s study has focused on providing the capability to respond to a threatening asteroid on short notices of a year or so. The plan would be to have two spacecraft on standby — one primary, the other backup — that could be launched on Delta 4 rockets. If the first spacecraft failed on launch or didn’t fragment the asteroid, the second would be sent aloft to finish the job. –Spacehttp://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/nuclear-detonation-the-best-way-to-deflect-threatening-asteroids-say-experts/

The 2.7-km-wide asteroid is receding from Earth now. Ironically, it will become easier to see in the nights ahead. 1998 QE2 is turning its sunlit side toward Earth, so it is growing brighter as it recedes. At maximum brightness on June 3rd and 4th, it will shine as brightly as a 10th or 11th magnitude star, an easy target for mid-sized backyard telescopes. While amateur astronomers watch 1998 QE2 glide through the constellations Libra and Ophiuchus, NASA radars will be pinging the space rock with powerful bursts of radio energy, obtaining images so crisp they will rival those of previous asteroid-spacecraft flybys. In this case, Earth is the spaceship! Stay tuned for updates. www.spaceweather.com